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| A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson |
I thought this was going to be a nice, little murder mystery, with the added bonus of being placed in an exotic location. It turned out to be a lot tougher than that. We start out with the usual: a white male PI (Private Investigator) with a girlfriend. He has a friend on the police force. He drinks too much and the text is full of tough guy lingo. He gets drafted into a criminal conspiracy where he is way out of his depth and he has to find a way out. That's all the usual, but the setting and the way the tale is told make it altogether a much grimmer kind of story. Instead of being set in one of the usual haunts like New York, London, or LA, this one is set in Cotonou, Benin (West Africa). I had heard of Benin, and I may even have known approximately where is was, but I had never heard of Cotonou. It's a sizable city, almost a million people, and just across the border from the center of the Nigerian 429 scam empire, Lagos. The entire coast along this section of Africa appears to be low lying land, swamps and lakes. This book was kind of hard to read, not because the sentence structure was weird or the vocabulary was unfamiliar, more because of the story. I would read a chapter or so and I would have to stop and let my mind recover from what I had just read.
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Update August 2018 replaced missing picture.
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